01 — THE MOOD
Hi divas 🤍
I’m writing this from the Qantas lounge before my fifth flight in a week, which tells you how my self-care is going.
This week I went to see Hilary Duff in Sydney and I have not been the same since. A stadium of women born between 1991 and 1995, every one of us a Lizzie McGuire girl with a mortgage and a skincare routine now, was so loud she had to stop and take it in. She wasn’t performing the old Hilary at us. She brought the woman she is now and let us bring the women we are now, and it hit harder for it.
That’s the trick, and it’s rare in retail. Oroton did it: same heritage, new girl, a bag you’d carry again. Plenty of the brands we grew up with are still working out which decade they belong to. Nostalgia on its own is a museum. Nostalgia with a point of view about who the girl is now is a growth strategy. Gucci has spent three years in the museum, and the deep dive is what that cost.
Sunday morning, before the airport, I was in Sydney for Sally’s ZIISH x She Walks fundraiser for Breast Cancer Network Australia. I’ve lost both my grandmothers to it and too many friends are going through it right now, themselves or with someone they love. If you can give anything, the page is here.
Two asks before they call my flight. If MOODY has got you something this year, a hire, a client, a friend, a yes you didn’t expect, reply and tell me. I want to hear it, and with your okay, share it. Then tell me what the girls want from MOODY before the year ends: a dinner, a city, a Deep Dive topic. I have forty minutes and a bad coffee, so I’m starting the list now.
Love Brooke x
02 — THE ROOM
The girls are getting things done. What 1,000 women in one group chat did for each other this week.
THE WINS
→ Alycia got Claude to build the reel editor the chat had been asking for. Alycia runs How Do I Podcast, and her tool cuts vertical video to look like you rather than a template: it asks about your brand and fonts first, and you change a cut by commenting on it. Ten free spots, eleven requests inside a day, and one tester’s review in full: “BRILLIANT”. Reel Studio →
→ Chiara closed her round. A SAFE with an $8m pre-money cap, pre-revenue and pre-launch, with the cap 30% above where she opened the conversations. She then turned around and talked another founder through how she priced it (see THE READ).
→ More from the room: a sales coach built her first website in an hour at a member’s free Canva workshop, a Sydney events founder got MAC to partner her YSO screening, a Melbourne founder’s canned hydration soda lands in late November, and our Brisbane city lead got married. 🤍
THE INTRODUCTIONS
→ The week’s asks, timed: a small-business accountant, four names in seven minutes. A Brisbane colourist, six in twenty. Hair and makeup at a client’s Sydney hotel, four artists in two minutes. A food technologist for a functional drink, the co-founder of Heaps Normal within the hour. None of it needed me, which is the point of the whole thing.
Also new in the room: a brand strategist ex-Zimmermann and Broadsheet, newly in Sydney; a former San Francisco engineering exec now running breathwork on the Northern Beaches; the founder of a social-led agency in Collingwood; and a Melbourne creative who joined ahead of the Melbourne event we’re planning. Say hi, they’re in General.
03 — THE VLOG
The Melbourne launch, and running in drag for charity. If you missed it last week: 180 of Australia’s most ambitious women in one Melbourne room, then Bridge to Brisbane in heels and a wig with Lulu LeMans for Small Steps 4 Hannah. Watch →
In light of this mornings news, should we move the Vlogs to IG?!
MOODY SPOTLIGHT is taking nominations. No interview this week, on purpose. After Vic of Vicalates, Rach of Smooch and Mel Drennan of Napoleon Perdis, who should be next? Reply with a name and one line on why, and I’ll chase her.
04 — THE READ
Temple & Webster let sales fall 8% and the shares jumped more than a quarter. Less discounting, some higher prices, contribution margin dollars up 16%, FY27 EBITDA guided 50 to 80% higher. AI did the operating work: recommendations lifted conversion 56% and 58,000 product pages were republished for AI assistants. Selling less on purpose, and getting paid for it. Inside Retail · Small Caps
Consumer confidence is at its 12th-lowest reading since 1973. ANZ-Roy Morgan printed 67.7, 56% of people say their family is worse off than a year ago, and ANZ expects another rate rise in November. Against that, Urbis has jewellery as the fastest-growing category across 516 centres at 11.6% and CBD centres leading at 7.1%. Smaller things, closer to town. Ragtrader · Ragtrader, Urbis
Chemist Warehouse comparable sales are up 9.8% and beauty is doing the lifting. Sigma’s AGM update names beauty, healthcare and GLP-1 support products as the strong categories and women’s fragrance as the soft one. In the week Gucci lost her, the pharmacy beauty aisle found her. The Motley Fool · Rask
TVSN closes on 15 November with small labels saying they haven’t been paid. Direct Group found no buyer or backer, a closing-down sale is clearing about $30m of stock, and labels including Caju Designs say invoices are outstanding. If you wholesale, your biggest customer is also your biggest credit risk. Ragtrader
Shona Joy is closing after 26 years, and it isn’t the money. Shona Thatcher told her 33 staff this morning that the label she started on Bondi market stalls in 2000 will close, everyone paid out, the name staying with her. Five years in Byron, a Rosebery commute that stopped working, four years of thinking, buyers that never felt right. Her line: “This business is my baby and my passion. But my children are my priority.” The bridesmaid dress half this chat has worn is closing on its own terms, which is an exit too, just not the kind anyone writes a LinkedIn post about. Cue closed 26 stores because it had no choice. AFR · Ragtrader, CEO exit in March
Gucci’s owner had its worst day on record. L’Oréal grew 7%. Kering fell 16% on Friday, the morning after reporting Gucci down 6%; Hermès hit a four-year low; L’Oréal grew 7.2% like-for-like and Puig’s make-up grew 16%. The gap between those numbers is where our customer is standing, which is the deep dive. Reuters · Kering
Witchery landed on Nordstrom, then hired American taste. Bellroy is opening twenty stores without a celebrity. Dani Michelle, who dresses Kendall Jenner and Hailey Bieber, got a 23-piece edit in September; Elsa Hosk got 25 this week, days after Witchery went live on Nordstrom.com. Borrowing American taste before asking for American customers is the smartest thing it has done in years. Archie Rose relaunched with co-owner Chris Hemsworth the same week. Bellroy’s is the one to study: $146m revenue, New York and Kuala Lumpur inside six months, each store meant to repay its fit-out within three years. Ragtrader · Marie Claire · B&T · SmartCompany
Anthropic filed to go public this morning: US$16.3bn of revenue in six months, an US$80.7bn loss. Ticker ANT on the Nasdaq, pricing aimed at mid-November, and the FT says investors expect US$1.5 to 1.75 trillion. Revenue was US$1.16bn in the same half last year; the loss is mostly accounting on convertible notes. Five days earlier it launched Claude Duet, an assistant that works in the background and asks before it sends, pays or deletes. For the girls who build on these tools, one thing changes: the company whose model is in your workflow now reports to you every quarter. CNBC · NPR · Claude Duet
Instagram is doing long-form video, and Mosseri admits he was against it. “Features” is horizontal, up to 90 minutes, US first, built for the TV, with Reels clips linking to the full episode so nobody leaves for YouTube. Rosie Brown’s read within the hour: Stories answered Snapchat, Reels answered TikTok, this answers YouTube, so build your pillars into a series, not a clip. The catch: no ad revenue share, just your existing brand deals. Until that arrives, Features is distribution for the audience you already have, not a business. 9to5Google · The Hollywood Reporter · Variety
OpenAI told Parliament it would “potentially” pay Australian creators. Asked by Labor MP Tim Watts whether it would pay into a fund for Australian creators, OpenAI’s written answer was “Potentially”, depending on “the activities and data that are in scope” and whether the scheme is “competitive with other jurisdictions, particularly the US.” It also wants to anchor a $7bn Sydney data centre. The data centre comes with a cheque. The creators come with a “potentially”. Forbes Australia
Canva launched its own image model the day after Getty Images filed for bankruptcy. Craft was trained on Canva’s human-designed templates, built in six months, and will run inside ChatGPT and Gemini. Getty, three decades of licensing the photo you were about to use, went into Chapter 11 after the Shutterstock merger collapsed. The moat moved from the archive to the taste of whoever trained the model. TechCrunch · Yahoo Finance
Cuttable raised $20m at a valuation north of $142m to automate your Meta ads. AirTree led. It turns the photos and video you already have into ads, and 450 companies have run $370m through it. Meta’s ad prices rose another 14% this quarter, which is the bill Cuttable sells against. SmartCompany · Mumbrella, Meta
How the chat values a pre-revenue startup. Don’t pay a broker to tell you what you’re worth. For an angel round you set the price, investors are buying what the business could become, and a SAFE or convertible note lets you skip the valuation until a priced round sets one. Chiara read the YC material, looked at comparables, picked a band and went. A pre-seed raise, explained (Batko) · Cut Through Venture Q3
05 — THE DEEP DIVE
Desirability can’t be discounted
The week in one sentence: the woman who used to save for a Gucci bag bought a Charlotte Tilbury palette, a Michael Hill chain and a very full Chemist Warehouse basket instead, and Gucci’s owner lost a sixth of its value finding out.
She didn’t ghost luxury. She ghosted Gucci. That’s the whole argument, and the difference between those two sentences is the difference between a pricing problem and a wanting problem. You can discount your way out of the first. Nobody has ever discounted their way out of the second.
What happened, without the spreadsheet. Four of the biggest companies in the business of making women want things reported in the same week. Kering, which owns Gucci, said Gucci’s sales fell 6%, and its shares fell 16% on Friday, the worst day in its history. L’Oréal grew 7%. Puig, which owns Charlotte Tilbury, grew make-up 16%. Hermès grew too and its shares still hit a four-year low, the market pricing a harder 2027 for the whole category rather than judging the bag. One was punished, two were paid, and the fourth got sold off for keeping company with the first.
The tell. Buried in Kering’s release is the line a merchant reads first: traffic was “the main constraint” while conversion, average price and basket all improved. Fewer women are walking into Gucci, and the ones who still do are spending more. In a downturn traffic and conversion fall together; here traffic fell and conversion rose, which is what it looks like when a brand stops being the one you tell your friends about. Hermès proves it from the other side, leather goods up 10.8% in the same quarter from the same wallets. The bag is fine. Gucci’s bag isn’t, and on its second new designer in three years you cannot ask a woman to save for eight months toward a brand that hasn’t decided what it is.
Where she went. Puig’s make-up grew 16% while its skincare, Charlotte Tilbury’s included, fell, which looks a lot like a woman choosing the thing she can see, finish and gift. Kering’s own jewellery houses grew 11%. At home, Chemist Warehouse is up 9.8% with beauty named as a driver, Michael Hill’s Australian comps are up 4%, and jewellery is the fastest-growing category in our shopping centres at 11.6%. She is still buying luxury. She’s buying the version that fits in her handbag and gets used every day.
Why you can’t discount it. Every merchant’s instinct when traffic falls is to lower the price of entry, and the analysts are already there: the consumer “still thinks prices are too high to digest,” one told Reuters, and Kering is “refining its product and pricing architecture,” handbags first. Fine. Price is necessary and nowhere near sufficient. A cheaper Gucci nobody wants is still a Gucci nobody wants. The $60 lipstick works because it’s the full brand at a price you can justify in a bad month; Gucci’s $4,000 stopped working because it stopped feeling like Gucci. One number to watch: wholesale grew 45% off a base Kering gutted to protect scarcity. It’s 9% of sales, not a leak yet, but if it keeps growing while the stores shrink, the outlet era has begun.
What this means if you sell anything. Your $300 hero is the bag; your $49 entry product is the lipstick. The brands growing in a quarter where 56% of Australians say they’re worse off are the ones whose entry ticket carries the whole brand. Pillow Talk isn’t the cheap version of Charlotte Tilbury; it’s the brand in your handbag every day, and the reason you eventually buy the Magic Cream. The mistake is making the entry product feel like the consolation prize. The bigger mistake is putting the hero on sale to fix traffic, because once a customer learns to wait for the discount, she never unlearns it.
My read. I collect Tom Ford-era Gucci bags, the 1990s ones, and Demna’s show in Milan a month ago has my heart: a replica Gucci store for a set, horsebits on everything, Demna talking about the bourgeois Gucci before Tom and refusing to build a whole vision on the 90s. That is the Hilary trick from THE MOOD, heritage with a point of view about who the girl is now, so the design problem is being solved.
None of it is in these numbers yet; the collection doesn’t reach stores until next year. Kering is also closing at least 125 stores, which fixes the rent bill faster than the wanting. JPMorgan called the progress “very early stages” and, as someone who wants to buy the bag, I think that’s fair. Two tests, with dates. If Gucci’s own-store sales aren’t growing in the fourth-quarter numbers Kering reports in February, on a comp that already fell hard, the closures were the easy part. If they still aren’t growing a quarter after the Milan collection lands, so the numbers next July, the recovery is a 2028 story and the Tom Ford girls will keep buying vintage. Meanwhile the money is at the beauty counter and in the jewellery case, and the Australian brands that build an entry ticket worthy of the brand will take it.
MONDAY
Audit your ladder. Write down your cheapest product and ask whether it carries the whole brand or apologises for being cheap. If it’s the second, re-present it before Christmas (packaging, copy, photography) and redesign it in the new year.
Protect the hero. The product that defines you never goes on percentage-off, Black Friday included. Volume moves through the entry product, bundles and gifting.
Watch traffic, not just revenue. Shopify sessions against conversion if you’re DTC, sell-through if you wholesale. Sessions falling while conversion holds means desire, not price, and no promotion fixes that.
Sources: Kering Q3 2026 revenue · Hermès Q3 2026 revenue · L’Oréal sales to 30 September 2026 · FashionUnited, Puig Q3 · Reuters, 23 Oct · Ragtrader, Urbis benchmarks · Ragtrader, Michael Hill · Ragtrader, consumer confidence · Sigma AGM update via The Motley Fool · Wallpaper, Gucci S/S 2027 show
06 — THE DIARY
No link means she’s in the chat; ask and someone will introduce you.
→ Wed 28 Oct · Sydney. Marika’s invitation-only founder dinner, ten seats.
→ Wed 28 Oct · Brisbane, 7:30am. MOODY coffee at Industry Beans, Newstead, via Jen Garner; Friday cocktails too.
→ Thu 29 Oct · Sydney. ENESA Styling Suite, personal styling for the room.
→ Thu 29 Oct · Sydney, 5:30pm. Aussie Founders Club’s first Sydney night at Stone & Chalk: Nevam, Upcover and Relume founders on the decisions they nearly got wrong. Free. RSVP
→ Fri 30 Oct · Brisbane, 3:15pm. Lisette’s Glimmer Luncheon raffle is drawn, $28,000 in prizes for the Mater’s stillbirth research centre. Enter →
→ November · Sydney. Wendy’s Walk & Talk mornings, three women a session. Book
→ Date TBC · Sydney, 5:30pm. WiSE launch party at UTS Startups with Christy Laurence (Plann) and SJ Kurtini (Tinybeans). Approval required. Request a seat [Brooke: date isn’t on the Luma page, check before send]
→ Thu 12 Nov · Sydney, Moore Park. Startup Padel for founders, operators and investors, racquet included. Apply
→ Thu 12 Nov · Melbourne, 6pm. The Edit by Kit Media Lab, StandardX, Fitzroy, hosted by Kim. Tickets
→ Thu 12 Nov · Sydney, 6pm. Bills to Business Class, WeWork Barangaroo, co-hosted by Priscilla, early bird $69. Tickets
→ Tue 24 Nov · Sydney, plus watch parties nationally. FoundHER Summit, with Emily of Emily Pivots speaking and Mia Bowyer’s AI set-up session. MOODY gets 10% off, ask Renate. Tickets
→ Fri 27 Nov · Brisbane, 6pm. The Design Party by PEDRATOPIA, West End, BYO, $15 early bird. pedratopia.com
→ Nov · Gold Coast, and Dec · Perth. The REAL, Lisa Kjerulf’s supper club for founders and investors, now a series with the Perspective X podcast; Melbourne, Sydney and Auckland next year. Past tables
Ali Skiba’s breathwork and sound journeys on the Northern Beaches are 10% off with the code MOODY. Dates
07 — CLASSIFIEDS
What a girl wants. What a girl needs.
→ Hiring: Process the Podcast wants a contract partnerships lead as Arielle heads to LA, New York and London to record 24 episodes. Email arielle@cinemathom.com with the first brand you’d call; closes Fri 30 Oct. Rosie is hiring a full-time social media manager in Melbourne, plus a freelance food creator (DM Rosie).
→ Available: Janine (JP) runs influencer campaigns outside the agency model, currently for Neutrogena and Aveeno (DM Janine). Brooke Dixon shoots 35mm and Super 8 (portfolio). Mae will do design work for the experience if the brand is right (DM Mae).
→ Brands wanted: a beauty partner for Polly’s next YSO screening (DM Polly); an activewear brand for Orsika’s giveaway (DM Orsika); a non-alcoholic drinks brand for Vee’s FoundHer night in Melbourne (DM Vee).
→ Wanted: a few aligned VCs and businesses behind Lisa’s The REAL x Perspective X series (deck, DM Lisa); a visionOS developer for Sababa’s AI On Apple hackathon team (DM Sababa); a Victorian discrimination lawyer for Laura’s women-only event (DM Laura).
→ For a good cause: Britt walked 7 Bridges for the Cancer Council yesterday, her 14th year. Donate →
No link means she’s in your city chat or General. Don’t know her yet, ask; the girls in there do.
Forward this to one girl who’d get it.
Then bring her in: the chat is here, and I’ll add her to her city.
Love Brooke x
MOODY is the intelligence, culture and network for ambitious women. Founders, operators, investors, corporates and creatives in the same group chat. These are the girls who get it, and we are in a MOOD.
@get__moody · getmoody.co · est. 2026